If, however, any one must have melodrama, but at the same time does not want it in stage form, I should myself recommend to him Frederic Soulie in preference to Eugene Sue. Soulie is, indeed, a sort of blend of Dumas and Sue, but more melodramatic than the former, and less full of grime and purpose and other "non-naturals" of the novel than the latter. It is evident that he has taken what we may call his schedules pretty directly from Scott himself; but he has filled them up with more melodramatic material. It is very noteworthy, too, that Soulie, like Dumas, turned _his_ stagy tastes and powers on to actual stage-work, and so kept the two currents duly separate. And it seems to be admitted that he had actual literary power, if he did not achieve much actual literary performance.
[Sidenote: _Le Chateau des Pyrenees._]
For myself, I think that _Le Chateau des Pyrenees_ is a thing, that in De Quincey"s famous phrase, you _can_ recommend to a friend whose appet.i.te in fiction is melodramatic. Here is, if not exactly "_G.o.d"s_ plenty," at any rate plenty of a kind--plenty whose horn is inexhaustible and the reverse of monotonous. You never, though you have read novels as the waves of the sea or the sands of the sh.o.r.e in number, know exactly what is going to happen, and when you think you know what is happening, it turns out to be something else. Persons who wear, as to the manner born, the jackets of lackeys turn out to be bishops; and bishops prove to be coiners. An important _jeune premier_ or _quasi-premier_, having just got off what seems to be imminent danger, is stabbed in the throat, is left for dead, and then carries out a series of risky operations and conversations for several hours. A castle, more than Udolphian in site, size, incidents, and opportunities, is burnt at a moment"s notice, as if it were a wigwam. Everybody"s sons and daughters are somebody else"s daughters and sons--a state of things not a little facilitated by the other fact that everybody"s wife is somebody else"s mistress. Everybody knows something mysterious and exceedingly damaging about everybody else; and the whole company would be cleared off the stage in the first few chapters if something did not always happen to make them drop the daggers in a continual stalemate.
Dukes who are governors of provinces and peers of France are also heads (or think they are) of secret societies--the orthodox members of which chiefly do the coining, but are quite ignorant that a large number of other members are Huguenots (it is not long after the "Revocation") and are, in the same castle, storing arms for an insurrection. Spanish counts who are supposed to have been murdered fifteen years ago turn up quite uninjured, and ready for the story to go on sixteen years longer.
When you have got an ivory casket supposed to be full of all sorts of compromising doc.u.ments, somebody produces another, exactly like it, but containing doc.u.ments more compromising still. There is a counsellor of the Parliament of Toulouse--supposed to be not merely a severe magistrate, but a man of spotless virtue, and one who actually submits fearlessly to great danger in doing his duty, but who turns out to be an atrocious criminal. And in the centre of all the turmoil there is a wondrous figure, a sorcerer-shepherd, who is really an Italian prince, who pulls all the strings, makes all cups slip at all lips, sets up and upsets all the puppets, and is finally poniarded by the wicked counsellor, both of them having been caught at last, and the counsellor going mad after commission of his final crime.
Now, if anybody wants more than this--there is, in fact, a great deal more in the compa.s.s of two volumes,[279] containing between them less than six hundred pages--all I can say is that he is vexatious and unreasonable, and that I have no sympathy whatever with him. Of course the book is of its own kind, and not of another. Some people may like that kind less than others; some may not like it at all. But in that case n.o.body obliges them to have anything to do with it.
Soulie wrote nearly two score novels or works of fiction, ranging from _Contes pour les Enfants_ to _Memoires du Diable_. I do not pretend to have read all or even very many of them, for, as I have confessed, they are not my special kind. In novels of action there should be a great deal of fighting and a great deal of love-making, and it does not seem to me that either[280] was Soulie"s forte. But as the _Memoires_ are sometimes quoted as his masterpiece, something should, I suppose, be said about them.
[Sidenote: _Les Memoires du Diable._]
One thing about the book is certain--that it is much more ambitiously planned than the _Chateau_; and I do not think it uncritical to say that the ambition is, to a certain extent, successful. One credit, at any rate, can hardly be denied it. Considering the immense variety in circ.u.mstances of the bargains with the Devil which are made in actual life, it may seem strange that the literary treatment of the subject should be so comparatively monotonous as it is. Soulie, I think, has been at least as original as anybody else, though it was of course almost impossible for him to avoid suggestions, if not of Marlowe, of Lesage, Goethe, Maturin (whose wide popularity in France at this time must never be forgotten), and others. At the very beginning there is one touch which, if not absolutely invented, is newish in the connection.
The Chateau of Ronquerolles, again in the Pyrenean district (besides the advantages of a mountainous country, Soulie himself was born at Foix), has a range of mysterious windows, each of which has for many generations emerged, with the room appertaining, from wall and corridor without anybody remembering it before.[281] As a matter of fact these chambers have been the scenes of successive bargains between the Lords of Ronquerolles and the Prince of Darkness; and a fresh one is opened whenever the last inheritor of an ancestral curse (details of which are explained later) has gone to close his account. The new Count de Luizzi knows what he has to do, which is to summon Satan by a certain little silver bell at the not most usual but sufficiently witching hour of _two_ A.M., saying at the same time, "Come!" After a slightly trivial farce-overture of apparitions in various ba.n.a.l forms, Luizzi compels the fallen archangel to show himself in his proper shape; and the bargain is concluded after some chaffering. It again is not quite the usual form; there being, as in Melmoth"s case, a redemption clause, though a different one. If the man can say and show, after ten years, that he has been happy he will escape. The "consideration" is also uncommon. Luizzi does not want wealth, which, indeed, he possesses; nor, directly, pleasure, etc., which he thinks he can procure for himself. He wants (G.o.d help him!) to know all about other people, their past lives, their temptations, etc.--a thing which a person of sense and taste would do anything, short of selling himself to the Devil, _not_ to know. There are, however, some apparently liberal, if discreditable, concessions--that Luizzi may reveal, print, and in any other way avail himself of the diabolic information. But, almost immediately, the metaphorical cloven foot and false dice appear. For it seems that in certain circ.u.mstances Luizzi can only rid himself of his ally when unwelcome, and perform other acts, at the price of forfeiting a month of his life--a thing likely to abridge and qualify the ten years very considerably, and the "happiness" more considerably still.[282] And this foul play, or at any rate sharp practice, continues, as might be expected, throughout. The evil actions which Luizzi commits are not, as usual, committed with impunity as to ordinary worldly consequences, while he is constantly enlarging the debt against his soul. He is also always getting into trouble by mixing up his supernatural knowledge with his ordinary life, and he even commits murder without intending or indeed knowing it. This is all rather cleverly managed; though the end--the usual sudden "foreclosure" by Diabolus, despite the effort of no less than three Gretchens who go upwards, and of a sort of inchoate repentance on Luizzi"s own part before he goes downwards--might be better.
The bulk, however, of the book, which is a very long one--three volumes and nearly a thousand closely printed pages--consists of the _histoires_ or "memoirs" (whence the t.i.tle) of other people which the Devil tells Luizzi, sometimes by actual _recit_, sometimes otherwise. Naturally they are most of them grimy; though there is nothing of the Laclos or even of the Paul de k.o.c.k kind. I find them, however, a little tedious.
[Sidenote: Later writers and writings of the cla.s.s.]
The fact, indeed, is that this kind of novel--as has been hinted sometimes, and sometimes frankly a.s.serted--has its own peculiar appeals; and that these appeals, as is always the case when they are peculiar, leave some ears deaf. There is no intention here to intimate any superfine scorn of it. It has another and a purely literary, or at least literary-scientific, interest as descending from the Terror Novel of the end of the eighteenth century. It shows no sign of ceasing to exist or to appeal to those to whom it is fitted to appeal, and who are fitted to be appealed to by it. Towards the close of the period at which I ceased to see French novels generally, I remember meeting with many examples of it. There was one which, with engaging candour, called itself _L"Hotellerie Sanglante_, and in which persons, after drinking wine which was, as Rogue Riderhood says, "fur from a "ealthy wine,"
retired to a rest which knew no or only a very brief and painful waking, under the guardianship of a young person, who, to any one in any other condition, would have seemed equally "fur" from an attractive young person. There was another, the t.i.tle of which I forget, in which the intended victim of a plunge into a water-logged _souterrain_ connected with the Seine made his way out and saw dreadful things in the house above. There is really no great interval or discrepancy (except in details of manners and morals) between these and the novels of detective, gentleman-thief, and other impolite life which delight many persons indubitably respectable and presumably intelligent in England to-day.[283] To sneer at these would be ridiculous.
[Sidenote: Murger.]
Henry Murger is not the least of the witnesses to the truth of a remark--which I owe to one of the critics of my earlier volume--that in England people (he was kind enough to except me) are too apt to accept the contemporary French estimates of French contemporary literature and the traditional French estimates of earlier authors. Murger had, I believe, a hardly earned and too brief popularity in his own country; and though it was a little before my time, I can believe that this overflowed into England. But the posthumous and accepted judgments of him altered _there_ to a sort of slighting patronage; and I remember that when, nearly twenty years after his death, I wrote on him in the _Fortnightly Review_,[284] some surprise at my loftier estimate was expressed _here_. The reasons for this depreciation are not hard to give, and as they form a base for, and indeed really a part of, my critical estimate they may be stated shortly. The "Bohemia"[285] of which Murger was the laureate, both in prose and verse, is a country whose charms have been admitted by some of the greatest, but which no wise person has ever regarded, much less recommended, as providing any city to dwell in; and which has certainly been the scene if not the occasion, not merely of much mischief, which does not particularly concern us, but of much foolishness and bad taste, which partly does. It was almost--not quite--the only theme of Murger"s songs and words.
And--last and perhaps most dangerous of all--there was the fact that, if not in definite Bohemianism, there was in other respects a good deal in him of a far minor Musset, and both in Bohemianism and other things still more of an inferior Gerard de Nerval. I believe the case _against_ has been fairly stated here.
[Sidenote: The _Vie de Boheme_.]
The case _for_ I have put in the essay referred to with the full, though, I think, not more than the fair emphasis allowed to even a critical advocate when he has to demolish charges. The historian pa.s.ses from bar to bench; and neither ought to speak, nor in this instance is inclined to speak, quite so enthusiastically. I admitted there that I did not think Murger"s comparatively early death lost us much; and I admit even more frankly here, that in what he has left there is no great variety of excellence, and that while there are numerous good things in the work, there is little that can be called actually great. But after these admissions no small amount remains to his credit as a writer who can manage both comedy and pathos; who, if he has no wide range or variety of subject, can vary his treatment quite efficiently, and who has a certain freshness rarely surviving the first years of journalism of all work. His faintly but truly charming verse is outside our bounds, and even prose poetry like "The Loves of a Cricket and a Spark of Flame"[286] are on the line, though this particular thing is not far below Gerard himself. The longer novels, _Adeline Protat_ and _Le Sabot Rouge_, are competent in execution and pleasant enough to read; yet they are not above good circulating-library strength. But the _Vie de Boheme_, in its various sections, and a great number of shorter tales and sketches, are thoroughly agreeable if not even delightful. Murger has completely shaken off the vulgarity which almost spoilt Pigault, and damaged Paul de k.o.c.k not a little. If any one who has not yet reached age, or has not let it make him "crabbed," cannot enjoy Schaunard and the tame lobster; the philosophic humours of Gustave (afterwards His Excellency Gustave) Colline; the great journal _Le Castor_,[287] which combined the service of the hat-trade with the promotion of high thinking and great writing; and the rest of the comedy of _La Vie de Boheme_ proper, I am sorry for him. He must have been, somehow, born wrong.
[Sidenote: _Les Buveurs d"Eau_ and the Miscellanies.]
The serious Bohemia of the _Buveurs d"Eau_ (the devotees of High Art who carry their devotion to the point of contemning all "commission" work whatsoever) may require more effort, or more special predestination, to get into full sympathy with it. The thing is n.o.ble; but it is n.o.bility _party per_ a very thin _pale_ with and from silliness; and the Devil"s Advocate has no very hard task in suggesting that it is not even n.o.bility at all, but a compound of idleness and affectation.[288] With rare exceptions, the greatest men of art and letters have never disdained, though they might not love, what one of them called "honest journey-work in default of better"; and when those exceptions come to be examined--as in the leading English cases of Milton[289] and Wordsworth--you generally find that the persons concerned never really felt the pinch of necessity. However, Murger makes the best of his Lazare and the rest of them; and his power over pathos, which is certainly not small, a.s.sists him as much here as it does _more_ than a.s.sist him--as it practically carries him through--in other stories such as _Le Manchon de Francine_ and _La Biographie d"un Inconnu_. And, moreover, he can use all these means and more in handfuls of little things--some mere _bleuettes_ (as the French call them)--_Comment on Devient Coloriste_, _Le Victime du Bonheur_, _La Fleur Bretonne_, _Le Fauteuil Enchante_, _Les Premieres Amours du Jeune Bleuet_.
With such high praise still allotted to an author, it may seem unfair not to give him more room; and I should certainly have done so if I had not had the other treatment to refer to. Since that existed, as in the similar cases of Sandeau, Bernard, and perhaps one or two more, it seemed to me that s.p.a.ce, becoming more and more valuable, might be economised, especially as, in his case and theirs, there is nothing extraordinary to interest, nothing difficult to discuss. _Tolle_, _lege_ is the suitable word for all three, and no fit person who obeys will regret his obedience.
[Sidenote: Reybaud--_Jerome Paturot_, and Thackeray on its earlier part.]
Any one who attempts to rival Thackeray"s abstract ("_with_ translations, Sir!") of the first part of Louis Reybaud"s _Jerome Paturot_ must have a better conceit of himself than that with which the present writer has been gifted, by the Divinity or any other power. The essay[290] in which this appears contains some of the rather rash and random judgments to which its great author was too much addicted; he had not, for instance, come to his later and saner estimate of Dumas,[291]
and still ranks him with Sue and Soulie. But the Paturot part itself is simply delightful, and must have sent many who were not fortunate enough to know (or fortunate enough _not_ to know) it already to the book. This well deserved and deserves to be known. Jerome"s own earlier career as a romantic and unread poet is not so brilliantly done as similar things in Gautier"s _Les Jeune-France_ and other books; but the Saint-Simonian sequel, in which so many _mil-huit-cent-trentiers_ besides Jerome himself and (so surprisingly) Sainte-Beuve indulged, is most capitally hit off. The hero"s further experiences in company-meddling (with not dissimilar results to those experienced by Thackeray"s own Samuel t.i.tmarsh, and probably or certainly by Thackeray himself); and as the editor of a journal enticing the _abonne_ with a _bonus_, which may be either a pair of boots, a greatcoat, or a _gigot_ at choice; the side-hits at law and medicine; the relapse into trade and National Guardism; the visit to the Tuileries; the sad bankruptcy and the subsequent retirement to a little place in the prefecture of a remote department--all these things are treated in the best Gallic fashion, and with a certain weight of metal not always achievable by "Gigadibs, the literary man," whether Gallic or Anglo-Saxon. Reybaud himself was a serious historian, a student of social philosophy, who has the melancholy honour of having popularised, if he did not invent, the word "Socialist" and the cheerfuller one of having faithfully dealt with the thing Socialism. And Jerome is well set off by his still more "Jeune-France" friend Oscar, a painter, not exactly a bad fellow, but a _poseur_, a dauber (he would have been a great Futurist or Cubist to-day), a very Bragadochio in words and flourish, and, alas! as he turns out presently, a Bragadochio also in deeds and courage.
[Sidenote: The windfall of Malvina.]
But the gem of the book perhaps, as far as good novel-matter is concerned (for Jerome himself is not much more than a stalking-horse for satire), is Malvina, his first left-handed and then "regularised"
spouse, and very much his better half. Malvina is Paul de k.o.c.k"s grisette (like all good daughters, she is very fond of her literary father) raised to a higher power, dealt with in a satiric fashion unknown to her parent, but in perfectly kindly temper. She is, though just a little imperious, a thoroughly "good sort," and, with occasional blunders, really a guardian angel to her good-hearted, not uncourageous, but visionary and unpractical lover and husband. She has the sharpest of tongues; the most housewifely and motherly of att.i.tudes; the flamingest of bonnets. It is she who suggests Saint-Simonianism (as a resource, not as a creed), and actually herself becomes a priestess of the first cla.s.s--till the funds give out. She, being an untiring and unabashed canva.s.ser, gets Jerome his various places; she reconciles his nightcap-making uncle to him; she, when the pair go to the Palace and he is basely occupied with supper, carries him off in dudgeon because none of the princes (and in fact n.o.body at all) has asked her to dance. And when at last he subsides upon his shelf at the country prefecture, she becomes delightfully domesticated--and keeps canaries.
The book (at least its first two parts) appeared in 1843, when the July Monarchy was still in days of such palminess as it ever possessed, and Thackeray reviewed it soon after. At the close of his article he expressed a hope that M. Reybaud "had more of it, in brain or portfolio, for the benefit of the lazy, novel-reading, unscientific world."
Whether, at that time, the hope was in course of gratification I do not know; but years later, when February had killed July, Thackeray"s wish was granted. It cannot be said that, as too often happens with wishes, the result was entirely disappointing; but it certainly justified the famous description of a still larger number of them, in that only half was granted and the rest "whistled down the wind."
[Sidenote: The difference of the Second Part.]
_Jerome Paturot a la recherche de la meilleure des Republiques_ almost dooms itself, by its t.i.tle, to be a very much less merry book than _Jerome Paturot a la recherche d"une position sociale_. The "sparkle"
which Thackeray had justly seen in the first part is far rarer in the second; in fact, were it not for Oscar to some extent and Malvina to a much greater, there would hardly be any sparkle at all. The Republic has been proclaimed; a new "Commissary" ("Prefect" is an altogether unrepublican word) is appointed; he is shortly after stirred up to vigorous action (usually in the way of cashiering officials), and Jerome is a victim of this _mot d"ordre_. He goes to Paris to solicit; after a certain interval (of course of failure) Malvina comes to look after him, and to exercise the charms of her _chapeau grenat_ once more. But even she fails to find the birds which (such as they were) she had caught in the earlier years" nests, until after the bloodshed of the barricades, where Oscar unfortunately fails to show himself a hero, while Jerome does useful work as a fighter on the side of comparative Order, and Malvina herself shines as a nurse. At last Paturot is appointed "Inspector-General of Arab Civilisation in North Africa," and the pair set out for this promised, if not promising, land. He, like Gigadibs, provides himself with "instruments of labour"; Malvina, agreeable to the last, provides _herself_ with several new dress-patterns of the latest fashion, and a complete collection of the _Journal des Modes_.
This not very elaborate scenario, as worked out, fills nearly a thousand pages; but it is very much to be feared that the "lazy novel-reader"
will get through but a few of them, and will readily return the book to his own or other library shelves. It is, in fact, a bitterly satiric but perfectly serious study--almost history--of the actual events of the earlier part of the interregnum between Louis Philippe and Napoleon the Third, of the latter of whom Reybaud (writing, it would seem, before he was even President), gives a very unflattering, though unnamed, description. Certainly more than half, perhaps more than three-quarters, of the book can claim no novel character at all.[292]
[Sidenote: Not much of a novel.]
It would be possible to extract (if one had s.p.a.ce and it were proportionately worth while) pa.s.sages from the remaining portion of very fair novel interest--the visit of the "Super-Commissary" to the Commissary; the history of the way in which, under the _regime_ of that _atelier national_ which some wiseacres want now with us, a large body of citizens was detailed to carry trees of liberty from a nursery garden in the suburbs of Paris to the _boulevards_; how these were uprooted without any regard to their arboreal welfare; how the national working-men got mainly drunk and wholly skylarky on the way, and how the unfortunate vegetables were good for nothing but firewood by the time they reached their destination; the humours of the open-air feast of the Republic; the storming of the a.s.sembly by the clubs; the oratory of Malvina (a very delectable morsel) in one of the said clubs devoted to the Rights of Women;[293] the scene where Oscar, coming by his own account from the barricades "with his hands and his feet and his raiment all red," manifests a decided disinclination to return thither--all these are admirable. But they would have to be dug out of a ma.s.s of history and philosophy which the "lazy novel-reader" would, it is to be feared, refuse with by no means lazy indignation and disgust.
[Sidenote: But an invaluable doc.u.ment.]
Yet one may venture, at the risk of the charge of stepping out of one"s proper sphere, to recommend the perusal of the book, very strongly, to all who care either to understand its "moment" or to prepare themselves for other moments which are at least announced as certain to come. The French revolutionary period of 1848 and the following years was perhaps the most perfect example in all history of a thing being allowed to show itself, in all its natural and therefore ineluctable developments, without disturbing influences of any kind. It was (if one may use patristic if not cla.s.sical Latin in the first word of the phrase) _Revolutio sibi permissa_. There was, of course, a good deal of somewhat similar trouble elsewhere in Europe at the time; but there was no European war of much importance, and no other power threatened or was in a position to threaten interference with French affairs--for the excellent reason that all were too much occupied with their own. There was no internal tyranny or trouble such as had undoubtedly caused--and as has been held by some to justify--the outburst of sixty years earlier, nor was there even any serious, though perhaps there was some minor, maladministration. But there had been, for twenty years, a weak, amorphous, discreditable, and discredited government; and there was a great deal of revolutionary spirit, old and new, about. So France determined--in a word unacademic but tempting--to "revolute," and she "revoluted" at discretion, or indiscretion, to the top of her bent. This part of _Jerome Paturot_ gives a minute and (having had a good deal to do with the study both of history and of politics in my time), I think I may say boldly, a faithful account of _how_ she did it. And I think, further, that, if at least some of the innocent folk who the other day hailed the dawn of the Russian revolution had been acquainted with the book, they might have been less jubilant; while acquaintance would have helped others to antic.i.p.ate the actual consequences. And I wish that some one would, in some form or other, bring its contents before those who, without being actual scoundrels, utter fanatics, or hopeless fools, want to bring revolution nearer home. Reybaud brings out, too verbosely and heavily perhaps, but with absolute truth and justice, the waste, the folly, the absolute illogicality of the popular cries, movements, everything. "Labour" was, happily, not then organised in France as it is in England to-day. But if any one would extract, and translate in a pamphlet form, the dying speech of the misguided tool Comtois in reference to his misleader, the typical "shop-steward"
Percheron, he would do a mighty good deed.
Still, of course this is a parenthesis; and the parenthesis is a thing hateful, I am told, perhaps not to G.o.ds but to some men.
Students of literature, even in a single language, much more in wider range, are well acquainted with a cla.s.s of writers, largely increased since the introduction of printing, and more largely still since that of "periodicals," who enjoy a considerable--sometimes almost a great--reputation in their own time, and then are not so much discredited or disapproved as simply forgotten. They disappear, and their habitation is hardly even the dust-bin; it is the _oubliette_; and their places are taken by others whose fates are _not_ other. In fact, they are, in the famous phrase, "Priests who slay the slayer," etc.
[Sidenote: Mery.]
Of these, in French, I myself hardly know a more remarkable example than Joseph Mery, who, born two years before the end of the eighteenth century, lived for just two-thirds of the nineteenth, wrote, from a very early age till his death, in prose and in verse and in drama; epics, satires, criticisms, novels, travels, Heaven knows what; who had the reputation of being one of the most brilliant talkers of his day; who collaborated[294] with Gautier and Gerard de Nerval and Sandeau and Mme.
de Girardin, and other people much greater than himself; from whose pen the beloved old "Collection Michel Levy" contained at least thirty volumes at the date of his death--the wreckage of perhaps a possible three hundred--and of whom, though I have several times in the half-century since dived into his work, I do not think I can find a single story of first, second, or even third-rate quality.[295]
[Sidenote: _Les Nuits Anglaises._]
As it happens, one volume of his, _Les Nuits Anglaises_, contains examples of his various manners, some of which may be noticed. Not all of them are stories, but it is fair to throw in a non-story because it is so very much better than the others. This is a "physionomie" of Manchester, written, it would seem, just at the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria; and it shows that Mery, as a writer of those middle articles or transformed _Spectator_ essays, which have played so large a part in the literature of the last century and a quarter, was not quite a negligible person. Moreover, the sort of thing, though not essential to the novelist"s art, is a valuable tool at his disposal.
[Sidenote: The minor stories.]
But here the author, who was a considerable traveller and not a bad judge of art, was to a large extent under the grip of fact: when he got into fiction he exhibited a sad want of discipline. One must allow something, no doubt, for the fact that the _goguenard_ element is avowedly strong in him. The second English Night, with its Oxfordshire election (he has actually got the name of "Parker" right, though Woodstock wobbles from the proper form to "Woostock," "Wostoog," etc.) and its experiences of an Indian gentleman who is exposed at Ellora (near Madras) to the influence of the upas tree, by a wicked emissary of the Royal Society, Sir Wales, as a scientific experiment; and the last, where two Frenchmen, liberated from the hulks at the close of the Napoleonic War, make a fortune by threatening to blow up the city of Dublin; may sue out their writ of ease under the statute of Goguenarderie. A third half-Eastern, half-English story (Mery was fond of the East), _Anglais et Chinois_, telling quite delicately the surprising adventures of a mate of H.M.S. _Jamesina_[296] in a sort of Chinese harem, has some positive merit, though it is too long. The longest and most ambitious tale, _Histoire d"une Colline_, if not "wholly serious" (as a famous phrase has it), seems to aim at a good deal of seriousness. Yet it is, as a matter of fact, rather more absurd than the pure extravaganzas.
[Sidenote: _Histoire d"une Colline._]
Sir John Lively--who appears neither to have inherited the t.i.tle (seeing that his sainted father, a victim of English tyranny, was named Arthur O"Tooley, perhaps one of the tailors of that ilk) nor to have paid M.
Mery five or ten thousand pounds for it--is an Irishman of the purest virtue and the n.o.blest sentiments, who possesses a cottage on a hill not far from the village and castle of Stafford. From this interesting height there are two views: one over the beautiful plains of Lancashire, another towards the brumous mountains of Oxfordshire. Lively always looks this latter way, because in coming from London he has seen, at the other village of Bucks, a divine creature who dispenses soda-water and some stronger liquors to the thirsty. She, like the ninepenny kettle of the song, "is Irish _tu_," and belongs to the well-known sept of the O"Killinghams. They are both fervent Roman Catholics (Mery is astoundingly severe on our "apostate" church, with its "insulted" Saint Paul"s and Saint Martin"s). She is also persecuted by an abominable English landlord, Mr. Igoghlein. The two meet at ma.s.s in "_the_ Catholic Church of the City," to which, "as in the time of Diocletian" (slightly altered to 1830-40), "a few faithful ones furtively glide, and seem to be in fear." To get money, Lively gambles, and (this is the sanest part of the book, for the reason that things went on in much the same way at Paris and at London) is cheated. But the cottage, and the hill with such commanding views, are discovered to be in the way of a new line and to conceal coal. He sells them to a Mr. Copperas; marries the beautiful O"Killingham; the bells of Dublin ring head over heels, "and Ireland hopes." Let it also be mentioned that in the course of the story we are more than once told of the double file of Mauresque, Spanish, Gothic, and Italian _colonnades_ which line the marvellous High Street of Oxford; and that Mr. Copperas visited that seat of learning to consult an expert in railways[297] and see his three largest shareholders. (Oh, these bloated dons!) That three members of "the society of _ti_total abstinence" drank, at the beautiful O"Killingham"s cottage, twenty pints of porter (White-bread), two flagons of whisky, and three of claret, may meet with less incredulity, though the a.s.sortment of liquor is barbarous and the quant.i.ty is certainly large. But let us turn from this nonsense to the remarkable Manchester article.
[Sidenote: The "Manchester" article.]
It was not for some thirty years later than Mery"s visit that I myself knew, and for some time lived in, the new-made "city," as it became, to the horror of Mr. Bright, just before Mery saw it. But though there must have been many changes in those thirty years, they were nothing to those which have taken place in the fifty that have pa.s.sed subsequently. And I can recognise the Manchester I knew in Mery"s sketch. This may seem to be at first an exceedingly moderate compliment--in fact something close to an insult. But it is nothing of the kind. It is true that there is considerable _navete_ in a sentence of his own: "En general les nationaux sont fort ignorants sur les phenomenes de leur pays; il faut s"adresser aux etrangers pour en obtenir la solution." And it is also true that our "nationals," at that time and since, have been excessively ignorant of phenomena which the French tourists of Louis Philippe"s reign discovered here, and surprised, not to say diverted, at the solutions thereof preferred by these obliging strangers. That Mery had something of the Michiels[298] in him, what has been said above should show. But in some strange way Manchester--foggiest and rainiest of all our industrial h.e.l.ls,[299] except Sheffield--seems to have made his brain clear and his sight dry, even in drawing a sort of half-Rembrandt, half-Callot picture. He takes, it is true, some time in freeing himself from that obsession by one of our _not_-prettiest inst.i.tutions, "street-walking," which has always beset the French.[300]